Beethoven and His Forerunners

by Daniel Gregory Mason

After musicians had once taken the plunge, and dared to make different melodies sound simultaneously, it took them but a comparatively short time (though eras in music, as in geology, are long) to combine the parts in other intervals than the fifth, to use varying intervals in successive chords, to add more voices, and in general to elaborate in every way their tissue of tones. Adopting, with some modifications, the Greek modes as the prescribed orbits of the individual melodies, they produced effects of harmony necessarily very unlike our modern ones, which are built upon the major and minor scales, but nevertheless novel and in their way extremely beautiful. The fabric of the mediæval ecclesiastical music was made up of a succession of shifting chords, each very pure and sweet in itself, yet without those definite connections with its fellows that modern habits of thought demand. The whole effect was curiously kaleidoscopic, mysterious, and vague. Unity depended, not on the piece being in any one key, which it never was, but on the melodies being coherent and expressive. These were the salient features, the harmony was ancillary and incidental. One voice after another came out from the filmy background, sounded for a moment above the rest, and subsided again, to be replaced by another. Not only was there no attempt at a definite series of even sections, built up into recognizable rhythms, such as are indispensable to modern music, but any such effect was studiously avoided. The effort was rather to make the voices interweave inextricably and untraceably. The entire mass was in constant flux and change, a body of lovely and expressive sound, without a single distinct lineament, or any conceivable whence or whither. In Palestrina we have the style at its acme, vague, iridescent, beautiful with a mystical and unearthly beauty. Beyond the point it reached with him, pure polyphonic music, without rhythmic or harmonic definition, could not go. Another critical point was reached, another transformation was imminent.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, moreover, there began to dawn upon men’s minds various new principles of musical construction which were pregnant with possibilities for a far wider and more vital development than any that had gone before. The rapidity with which the art now began to grow, ramify, and mature, the variety of the new tendencies, and the multiplicity of different styles or orders of art, such as opera and oratorio, fugue and sonata, toward which they led, are surprising. In the countless centuries before Palestrina music grew slowly and uniformly, like a plant; in the short three hundred years between the birth of Palestrina in 1528 and the death of Beethoven in 1827, it had its inconceivably rich and various blossoming, and Monteverde and Gluck, Corelli and Scarlatti, Couperin and Rameau, Bach and Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, were the bright flowers it now put forth. Such a rapid and many-sided advance is fairly bewildering; but it is nevertheless possible to distinguish in the movement a few salient and dominant features, more significant and remarkable than all the others. From our present point of view, the labors of J. S. Bach in the fugue and suite forms, and of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in the sonata form, are of supreme interest. These labors were guided and fructified by several new principles of musical effect.[5]

The first step toward new fields was taken early in the seventeenth century by a set of daring reformers in Florence, who, boldly discarding the perfect polyphonic style of Palestrina, contrived a style of dramatic music, embodied in small operas, in which single voices sing more or less expressive melodies over an instrumental accompaniment in chords. Crude in the extreme as were necessarily the compositions of Cavaliere, Caccini, Peri, and their fellows, they opened up novel paths, because they had to rely for their effectiveness largely on the conduct of the harmonies employed. So long as the old church modes were adhered to, to be sure, the harmonic style remained necessarily vague, wandering, and monotonous; but gradually the composers began to see that, by altering their intervals, they could introduce variety and contrast into their cadences, making one line end on one chord, and the next on a different though related one, and that thus they could make coherent the successive phrases, punctuated by the cadences, and at the same time set them in an opposition that made for variety. In the interests of definiteness of cadence and an obvious distribution of contrasted yet complementary chords, therefore, the modes were slowly transformed into the modern scale, and music became at last harmonically definite and firm. All the tones came to be conceived as grouped around certain tonal centres, which could be manipulated and organized like the masses in a picture. Thus emerged the principle of tonality or key, and in the course of time the device of modulation by which one passes from one key to another. Still it remained difficult to get far away from the key in which one started out, because of the manner of tuning, which made only a few keys available at once; but J. S. Bach, modifying the system of tuning to what is called equal temperament,[6] which opens the doors simultaneously to the entire twelve keys, emancipated music entirely from the restrictions of the ecclesiastical modes, and in his great work, “The Well-[or Equally-] Tempered Clavichord,” demonstrated practically the use of all the twelve keys as an intimate and compact family. By his time the principle of tonality was firmly established.

A second principle vital to modern music is that of “thematic development.” By this is meant, first, the existence in the music of certain salient, easily recognizable groups of tones, called motifs, subjects, or themes, which are presented to the hearer at the outset, and impressed upon him by their unique individuality of cut; and second, that subsequent elaboration of these themes, in varied but still recognizable forms, which corresponds closely with the process by which an essayist develops an idea, a mathematician proves a theorem, or a preacher elucidates a text. It is interesting to note that the German word “Satz,” often used by musicians to mean “a theme,” signifies primarily a thesis or proposition in logic, while “Durchführung,” used to describe the development of the theme, means primarily a leading-through or bringing to an issue. Thus the process of thematic development in music is much like any other process of intellectual statement and proof. Now it is evident that this process, which is indispensable to all the higher intellectual forms of music, requires in the first place definite, concise, and memorable themes, since it is impossible to discuss what one fails to grasp, or after grasping, forgets. As the proverb says, the preparer of a ragout of hare must “first catch his hare.” Similarly musicians, before they could make their music logical, had to catch their themes. But as musical material up to the time of Palestrina never was definite or memorable, the first requisite of thematic music was some principle by which themes could be defined. This principle was found in the time-measurement of tones. So soon as a group of tones were placed in measured relations of duration to one another, an individual theme emerged, and could be elaborated. The second great conquest of modern music, then, was the conquest of the definite theme or motif, strictly measured in time, and of those devices by which it could be developed in an extended and logical discourse.

The third notable achievement of seventeenth century composers was the emancipation of music from servitude to poetry, and the establishment of it as an independent art. In one sense this was but a natural outcome of its new qualities of harmonic and thematic definition, lacking which it could never reach independence. So long as it remained in itself vague, amorphous, inchoate, it was constrained to be but a hand-maid, to content itself with lending eloquence or atmosphere to the utterances of its sister art; but this condition of dependence, however inevitable for a time, was nevertheless unfortunate, and bound to be eventually outlived. Music is always fatally handicapped by association with words. In the first place, words impose upon it a concrete meaning immeasurably more trite, prosaic, and limited than that abstract and indefinable meaning to the heart and mind which is its proper prerogative; the expressive power of music really begins where that of poetry fails and ceases. In the second place, the limitations of all vocal music are in many ways serious. Not only are voices incapable of sounding readily and with certainty many intervals, but they are confined to a range of a little over three octaves, and to phrases short enough not to overtax the breath. Instruments are free from all these disqualifications. They produce pure tones, without words, the most celestial of artistic materials; they can sound any interval; they extend over a range of more than seven octaves, from the deep bass of the organ or contrabass to the shrill and immaterial treble of the piccolo; and the breadth of the phrases they can produce is limited not by their own mechanism, but only by the power of intellectual synthesis possessed by listeners. For all these reasons, instruments are the ideal media for producing music; and never until they supplanted voices could music reach its complete stature as a mature and self-sufficient art, leaning on no crutch, borrowing no raison d’être, but making by its own legitimate means its own unique effects.

The task of seventeenth century musicians was, then, in large part, the establishment of tonality and the hierarchy of keys, contrasted with one another, but accessible by modulation; the crystallization, by means of both harmonic and metrical definition, of individual themes out of the amorphous tonal matrix of previous eras, and the exploration of means for building up these themes into coherent organisms; and lastly the emancipation of the art thus brought into full life from the tyranny of association with words and voices. This was an immense task; and it is not to be wondered at that most of the men engaged in it never attained mastery enough to give them great personal prominence. Theirs was a time of beginnings, of preparation for novel and unprecedented achievements. The early opera-writers, the Italian violinists, the German organists, and the clavichord and harpsichord writers of that period, men like Cavaliere and Caccini, Corelli and Scarlatti, Sweelinck and Frescobaldi, Purcell, Kuhnau, and Couperin, are chiefly known to us as preparers of the soil, and sowers of the seed, for a harvest which was gathered by later, and probably greater, though not more honorable men. The first composer after Palestrina who like him overtopped all his fellows, and brought to its culmination another great period, was Johann Sebastian Bach.

In Bach’s style we find, in addition to the polyphonic or many-voiced texture of Palestrina, a thematic pointedness and logic and a harmonic structure which are entirely unforeshadowed in the older man. The fugue, a form which he carried to its highest pitch, and which was admirably suited to his genius, is in certain respects allied to the earlier style, though in others wholly modern. Like the ecclesiastical forms of Palestrina, it is of the basket-work type of texture. One voice begins alone, others enter in succession,and all wind in and out amongst one another almost as intricately as in a sixteenth century madrigal. On the other hand, the fugue as a whole begins and ends in some one key, and throughout its progress modulates from key to key with well-planned contrasts and firmly-controlled movement. Moreover, a single definite theme or subject appears at the outset of the piece, and stands prominently forth through its whole extent; it is announced by the first voice, repeated at a different pitch in the answer of the second, reiterated again by the third and fourth, and subsequently made the basis of an ingenious, varied, and extended development. Finally, although some of Bach’s fugues are vocal, most of them are written either for organ or for clavichord. In all these respects his work is modern, and perhaps most of all is it modern in its inexorable logic, its subtlety and variety, and in its poignant, deeply emotional expressiveness, which is always held within the bounds necessary to supreme architectural beauty. The period of Bach and his precursors, sometimes called the “polyphonic-harmonic” period, because in it the modern harmonic system was grafted upon the polyphony of Palestrina, remains to-day, from some points of view, the purest and noblest period of musical history.

All the time that Bach, in the privacy of an obscure German town, was writing his wonderfully intricate and beautiful polyphonic music, the world about him, oblivious, was seeking out a quite different type of art. It is a surprising fact that Bach’s compositions were virtually unknown for fifty years after his death, and might have remained so permanently had they not been “discovered” by appreciative students, much as the receptacles of classical lore were discovered in the Renaissance after the long darkness of the Middle Ages, and made the basis of an intellectual revival. Bach’s great works, too, were full of an undying vitality; but for a long time their potency had to remain latent, because men were occupied with another order of art, a different set of problems, an alien style. Ever since the Florentine revolution, when the polyphonic texture of mediæval music was abandoned for a simple monodic or one-voiced style, in which a melody is accompanied by a series of chords, much of the musical genius of the world had been devoted to the development of eloquent single melodies, and of suitable harmonic backgrounds for them. With the systematization of harmony and the establishment of definite themes this type of art became mature. Composers discerned the possibility of building up whole movements to which interest could be given by the statement and development of one or more themes, contrasted both in character and in key. They saw that the whole could be unified by general qualities of style, by recurrence of the themes, and, above all, by being made to embody, in the long run, a single tonality, though with momentary departures from it for the sake of variety. Working out their idea, they devised a type of structure which has remained up to this day the highest and most widely useful of all musical forms. The essential features of “sonata-form,” as it is called, are, in the first place, the Exposition of two themes or subjects of discourse, contrasting both in character and in key; in the second place, the Development of these themes, the exploitation of their latent possibilities; in the third place, Restatement of them, in the central key of the movement, bringing all to a point, and completing the cycle of Statement, Argument, and Summary. Sonata-form, of which it is easy to see the naturalness and beauty, depends for its unity, not on the equal interplay of many voices, like the older polyphonic forms, but on the saliency, cumulative development, and harmonic inter-relations, of single themes. We may, therefore, call the great period of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the period in which the sonata-form attained its full maturity, the “harmonic period,” or, in view of the complete round or circuit of themes its forms exemplified, the “cyclical-form period.” It culminated in the early years of the nineteenth century, in the grand works of Beethoven’s maturity.

After Beethoven, music began to ramify in so many directions that it is impossible to classify its phases in a hard-and-fast series. It had its romanticists, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, who uttered with freer passion and poetry the emotional and spiritual meanings already heard in Beethoven. It had its realists, notably Berlioz and Liszt, who, attempting to divert it into the realm of pictorial delineation and description, have been followed by all the horde of contemporary writers of programme-music. It had its nationalists, men like Glinka, Smetana, and in our own day, Grieg and Dvořák, who sought to impress upon its speech a local accent. Above all, it had one great master, Brahms, who, assimilating the polyphony of Bach, the architectonic structure of Beethoven, and the romantic ardor of Schumann, added to them all his own austere beauty and profound feeling. But we are too near these later masters to get any general, justly-proportioned view of them. It is on the horizon only that mountains cease to be solitary peaks, and become ranges, the trend and disposition of which can be accurately plotted on the maps. The general tendency of musical evolution, down to Beethoven so clearly traceable, so obviously continuous, becomes after him bafflingly complex.

Fortunately, this complexity need not embarrass our present undertaking. We have seen how, in the gradual and laborious, but incessant and inevitable growth of musical art, period succeeded period as the artistic faculty of man constantly discerned new possibilities of beauty, sensuous, expressive, and æsthetic, in the tonal material with which it dealt. We have seen how this evolution tended always from the indefinite, incoherent, and homogeneous toward the definite, coherent, and heterogeneous; and how it tended to embody ever higher and higher values, beginning with the mere sense-stimulations of savages and leading up to the highly complex and intellectual sound-fabric of Beethoven, in which the sensuous and emotional values are held ever subordinate to the æsthetic. We have examined, briefly and summarily, the special characteristics of the successive periods into which the great evolution has been divided by those critical points which the nature of its material determined. With the general view of musical history thus gained held clearly in mind, we may now profitably pass to that more detailed study of the great period of Beethoven, the golden age of pure music, which is the especial task before us.